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Saturday, October 03, 2009

Catching up on Interweb Reading

I spent a week at the Toronto film festival--more on that in a post coming up next week--and then came down with 'festival exhaustion'. Now I've now been catching up on all the Internet movie reading I missed in the last few weeks. Let me collect some of it here:

-- At Slow TV, a terrific debate on the new Tarantino film featuring Adrian Martin and three other critics/scholars.

-- Zach Campbell: "Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems." Also: Zach on Inglourious Basterds: "Quentin Tarantino has an incredibly unphilosophical mind, and this is both his strength and his problem. Not even in his most mature work (Jackie Brown) does he really question anything. The root of his cinema is pleasure, a deeply tactile, visceral, and memory-based pleasure for which, presumably, there are no limits worth abiding (in quantity or quality)."

16 Comments:

Corey Creekmur said...

Bahut shukriya, Pandit-ji! Between you and Catherine Grant, I may never read anything printed on paper again ... Oh, wait, the mail just arrived. Film journals! Cinema Journal, Sight and Sound, Cineaste ...

Great links (and thanks, as always, for linkin' to me). Chachan's a really interesting figure. I recommend his writings on music (especially the recorded variety) over his writing on film, though. Repeated Takes and Music Practica are both really fascinating books -- especially the former. I think there's more in relation to cinema there than in any of his books on film. Which is not to say that his writing on film isn't good -- actually quite so, since it happens to be influenced by his ideas about music.

I'd like to add that the most recent post at Chachan's blog (entitled "Soundtrack Thoughts," and dealing, like all of his best writing, with sound recording) is excellent, and everyone here should read it.

The latest issue of Screening the Past surrounding the re-discovery of an early feature shot in Africa, Rose of Rhodesia, is well worth checking out.

I haven't read all of the articles yet, but the first three were all very good. Best of all, the movie is available in a streaming version; it's a very rare opportunity to see a film from that period shot in Africa.

Welcome back, Girish, and thanks for the link. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Toronto. I'm heading to the Pusan festival this weekend and will be seeing some films that also played in Toronto. I'll be posting about it the end of next week.

Watched Powell/Pressburger's I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! (1945) again. The abstract (fable, myth, symbol) blends with the brute concrete (rocky Scottish Hebrides, the angry, choppy sea, the ripping wind). One great image among many: Wendy Hiller lying in a strange dark bedroom counting beams on the ceiling--and making a wish.

I watched IKWIG! again recently as well. Watch closely the scene where Joan, arriving at Catriona's house, is greeted by Torquil and the Colonel. Powell stretches continuity to the breaking point, it seems, to suggest Joan disorientation in this strange place. Wonderful.

Chris, I didn't notice that! Here's one startling cut: Torquil, looking toward the camera, recites the first two lines of a song to Joan (we see him in medium shot), then a CUT (unexpected, since he is in mid-lyric) to a close-up of him, in which he turns 90 degrees to his right and upward (Joan is on a ladder, a couple of steps above him), and recites the next line of the lyric directly to Joan (something like "I want you to be my maid"). A small, wonderful moment which gets its charge from the jarring edit.

Girish,Vis a vis your recommendation of Robert Bird's stuff on Tarkovsky at the Tate, I would hazard the opinion that his book, ANDREI TARKOVSKY: Elements of Cinema, is the best most thoughtful single-director monograph published in the last decade or so, and if there's a better one I'd be curious to know what it is.